German Colonists from Bessarabia in Russian Historical Literature of the 19th – Early 20th Centuries

The article analyses the Russian historiographical heritage of German settlers in Bessarabia in the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, the least researched period in Russian history. The historical Bessarabia territory is currently part of the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. Despite using the same documents, the studies on the Germans of Bessarabia reach different conclusions because they depended on the political conjuncture in which the papers were written. Russian authors of the 19th - the first decades of the 20th centuries viewed German settlers’ ethnic, confessional and agricultural development in Bessarabia from different angles, often guided by their subjective impressions. The researchers covering this period relied exclusively on the recollections of contemporaries of German ancestors who had been living in Bessarabia since the beginning of the 19th century. Often, the authors used unverified propaganda information. In this paper, printed sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were used to create a coherent image of the German population in Bessarabia and reflect the attitudes of Russian scientists and authorities regarding this ethnical group of immigrants who endured great hardship.